By Eric Sprague C & R Magazine 07/09/2024
Very few professions have the stress levels that come with being a restorer. In addition to the immediate stressors restorers experience with working long hours, doing hard labor (in sometimes dangerous conditions), and the family stresses caused by on-call schedules; there is also the long term emotional toll created from dealing with so much tragedy. Restorers have an extreme job, so the restorer needs to take preventative measures to make sure they do not burn out.
For owners and managers, it is important to recognize that the stress and the toll of the industry is a real thing for their team and it can have a very large impact on the company’s bottom line. As all of us know, turnover of trained employees is a very real concern for all restoration companies and an often discussed topic amongst restorers. I have seen in surveys where the replacement cost of losing a trained water damage technician is 1.6 times their yearly salary and the average tenure of a water damage tech is less than one year. It does not take long before this becomes very costly for the company. For project managers and managers the replacement cost is much higher, and it can have devastating effects on a company.
So what do we do? It’s a tough industry. We cannot change that. True, but we can change our response to it. We can change our attitude about the challenges and instead of chalking it up to people not being “tough enough” we can create change in our organizations to recognize, deal with, and support our people so they are healthier, happier, and stay with us longer.
Here are a few ideas you can mull over to build a long term employee retention program for your frontline employees:
Create an In-House Peer Group: Sometimes just talking about the stress of the job with others who also experience it can be helpful. Building strong relationships with colleagues and allowing people to share their experiences can be cathartic.
Share Stress Management Techniques: Sometimes employees just need to learn how to use a few easy methods to better control their stress instead of utilizing destructive behaviors as a stress reduction method. Having someone teach the team deep breathing, mindfulness, and visualization can be very helpful to highly stressed team members.
Team Debriefing Sessions: for tough jobs a team debrief can be a useful tool for those involved to talk about a hard job or situation. Having a huddle to talk about what was hard, what went wrong, and how to mitigate or avoid those situations in the future can be very useful exercises for the team.
Teaching Physical Coping Strategies: Encouraging team members to exercise, eat a more healthy diet, and how physical exercise can help stress. Many companies offer a gym membership or a credit toward a gym membership as a perk of employment and a tool for the team to stay mentally and physically stronger.
Encourage Hobbies Outside of Work: Take an interest in the employee’s hobby and allow them to share their passions outside of work with the rest of the team.
I know all of this is probably sounding pretty “woo-woo” to many reading this article. However, I think we need to be honest with ourselves about a few things as our industry matures. We need to recognize that for our Millennial and Gen Z team members, this type of support is welcome and important to many of them. They tend to be much more open than older generations about how they are feeling, their anxieties, and the toll the job takes on their life outside of work. For employers to not address these trends will be professional suicide moving forward as the older generations age out of our industry. I feel strongly that the companies that invest and deal with the issues I am writing about here are going to be the ones who, ultimately, will dominate their markets because they will build the best teams. We all know having great talent makes building a great company much easier. Investing in our employees will not only help with employee retention, but it will also make your company a more attractive place of employment for potential staff members.
We also need to look outside of our industry to other high stress professions to see what they do to help their teams thrive. When I think of stressful professions I immediately think of the US Military. There is no other profession that is more stressful. The military has a strong understanding that it needs to manage and protect its members and their families due to the extreme nature of their profession. Now, I am not equating restoration to a military career. However, whenever I am trying to figure out a problem, I look to organizations that have created best practices so I can learn and scale those practices to my needs. Let’s look at some of the services the military offers its people to keep them performing at the highest level.
1. Family Support Groups: the military understands their soldiers cannot perform at the highest level when their family members are under duress, too. Therefore, they offer support to the spouses and children to help minimize soldier stress. As we all know, the families of restorers are deeply affected by our profession. Any small act we can do to make this a little better for the family will produce large dividends for our company.
2. PTSD Awareness and Education: post traumatic stress disorder does not only happen to soldiers. There are many situations where restorers, especially those who deal with trauma clean-up, can be deeply affected by situations that happen on the job. Creating awareness and providing education in this area can be very helpful to our team members.
3. Mobile Apps and Online Resources: the military is using technology to help its soldiers with their mental health. They are using online platforms and phone apps to provide tools for both mental and physical health. There are many very inexpensive apps on the market, which range from $10-15 per month which can help with this. Apps such as Headspace, Calm, and Stoa are excellent tools for team members to enhance their ability to cope with stress.
I am not unaware that you are probably reading this thinking, Eric this is all going to cost me lots of money, why would I do this? I understand, but I think all of us need to analyze what is really costing us a lot of money. As we all know, doing preventative maintenance on a building, a vehicle, or a piece of equipment is almost always cheaper than ignoring the problem until it is in crisis mode. I feel the same about our teams. It is cheaper and more effective to continuously perform “preventative maintenance” on our team members than to wait until their check engine lights are flashing red and we are now reacting to replace them because we waited too long to address the problem. So, give this some thought. Think about the investment you have made in each team member and how to best care for that investment to have it pay off long term.
